It Could Be Said #33 The Tories Sound Better But They Still Lack Something To Say
Rishi Sunak has stemmed the bleeding but the Tories are still deathfully ill
The elevation of Rishi Sunak to the Prime Minister both feels like a wrong being righted and remarkably sudden; it is not yet a month since Liz Truss fired her Chancellor in a doomed attempt to save her premiership.
I’ve written about the economic mistakes she and Kwasi Kwarteng made, both here and over at City A.M, but I really think Rishi Sunak’s first few days are a testament to how important the mechanics of politics i.e. does someone look good on television, can they string a sentence together, do they have a full range of facial expressions, etc. It is of course grossly superficial that Rishi Sunak is a more plausible Prime Minister because he’s good looking and well-spoken, but have you met the British public? Indeed, one could well say that passing the “would not be disappointed if your daughter brought them home” is the key challenge that male politicians must pass here.
(An aside – I think the reverse test for female politicians helps explain why Truss’s cosplaying as Margaret Thatcher always ran hollow – she was clearly too brittle in personality and too crazy in beliefs to reassure any mother-in-law that she’d whip her underperforming son into shape unlike her previous two female predecessors)
It is both easy and fun to mock those who are celebrating the return of the grown-ups given that Sunak surely has less political experience than any Prime Minister ever. An underacknowledged reason Sunak imploded over the summer was that many within the Tory Party worried that his struggles to navigate Partygate or explain his wife’s financial affairs showed that the poise he demonstrated throughout the pandemic couldn’t be sustained in more testing political climates. But a bizarrely stilted pool clip welcoming his election as Tory leader aside, he has demonstrated why he’s clearly a higher quality politician than Truss, and a more technically sound one than Boris Johnson.
You saw the best of this at his first Prime Minister Questions. Here was a Prime Minister who could both speak with passion unlike Truss, but likewise get through a passionate answer without becoming short of breath like Johnson. He neither retreated into her succinct bluntness or his ponderous waffle, instead throwing out attack lines or reassuring platitudes as the situation demanded it. It was a seriously impressive technical performance given that he realistically couldn’t have expected to take these questions any earlier than Boris Johnson’s withdrawal on Sunday night. And for all those rushing to say that performances at PMQs don’t matter, it’s worth remember that the last time someone who had been Chancellor took their first PMQs, it was the earliest sign that their premiership wasn’t going to be the success people hoped, as a Gordon Brown who had grown rigid during his long tenure at the Treasury struggled with the cut and thrust of parliament’s blue ribbard event.
I used that phrase deliberately; much like Test Cricket, parliament somehow combines a love of tradition with a paranoia that it’s failing to engage broader society and is doomed to irrelevance. There was a palpable sense that MPs on all side were just relieved to have two lead actors who could give the event the level of performance the event deserved for the first time since 2015. I suspect that positivity will rebound to Sunak’s credit more often than not. Likewise, whilst it was embarrassing that on his first hospital visit he was berated by a patient to pay nurses more, the fact that he could handle the confrontation more smoothly than either his predecessors minimised the damage; notice how nobody accused him of freezing or dismissing her concerns. Imagine how that situation could have gone if the Prime Minister on the other side was Truss or Johnson, her frozen on the spot or him failing to soothe the patient.
So, politicians being good at politics matters, but it should be noted that Theresa May got the premiership rather than George Osborne, Jeremy Corbyn defeated Andy Burnham, and Boris Johnson left smoother challengers like Jeremy Hunt and Dominic Rabb in the dust. And that’s because in politics both tactics and strategy matters; May won because she her combination of muted support for Remain and loud opposition to mass immigration seemed like the sweet spot for a Tory Party trying to sidestep a nasty internal civil war over Brexit. Likewise, Corbyn was the only candidate who spoke to Labour members and supporters’ frustration with Ed Miliband and Ed Ball’s half-hearted opposition to Tory austerity, and only Johnson could plausibly promise to drown out Nigel Farage and reunite the Brexiter Right.
And as I wrote back in the summer, Sunak lost to his awkward rival Liz Truss, due to her having better identified what the Tory Party wanted. Now he hopes he is giving his party enough for them to allow him to pass his forthcoming package of tax rises and spending cuts. What Sunak has failed to do is provide a similar rationale to country about why they should be excited about his premiership. Partially he wasn’t helped by the way the Liz Truss government imploded which saddled him with a Chancellor not of his own choosing and pre-empted his return to financial sanity. But Sunak also stepped on his rollout by soft-pedalling his disagreements with Truss and not making a clear enough breach with her unpopular environmental policies.
Being better at the performance of politics is a good for Rishi Sunak, in the same way it was a good start for Michael Howard after replacing Iain Duncan Smith. People rightfully expect their politicians to be competent at talking to them but they only reward those who say something worth listening to.